Meditation on a Line From Whitman
By Don
Bogen
(posted Wednesday, May
6, 1998)
To hear the poet read
"Meditation on a Line From Whitman," click .
They are so lonely, our
dying cities,specks on the vast familiar map that looks like a side of beef,in
boldface or marked with a circled dot,ringed by their beltways, linked into
nameless constellations by the interstates.Some are red giants, spreading
and cooling in the smoggy dusk,others dwarfs with dense shrunken coresor black
holes so involuted they swallow the light around them.
On my way out of town, I
drive through a fold in time,a tunnel through the history of
shopping:boarded-up storefronts on the narrow commercial streets,the old strips
and plazas with a muffler shop or a chicken fryer left,and larger sites--a
five-and-dime blown out into a warehouse,fast-food shops, all local chains
now,with their scratchy speakers and pot-holed drive-thru lanes;then the first
real malls, big as aircraft carriers, low and blocky,their outlying coffee
shops and two-screen theaters like escorts;at last a quieting stretch, the
freeway growing wallsand the walled tracts all around nestled in their
names--The Willows, Hunt Club Crossing, Hidden Acres--their malls planted,
soft-colored, smoothly designed,broad single lumps surrounded by asphalt
prairie,distant and unobtrusive as buttes.
What is an executive home?
Who lives there?I imagine the orbiting managers, shifted every five yearsto
another desirable location beyond the beltway,another stand of young pines and
curving roads, another commute,another city as a set of season tickets to the
football gamesor a pass even to skyboxes if they should rise so high.Some will.
At home, in their brief stops,they glide effortlessly up the ladder of good
schools,ladder of yard space, of techno-buttonsin the family room, vehicles
lined on the drive,the whole ensemble an island drifting further and further
from the rotted core.
Bland wealth of the
suburbs,it's futile to keep despising it, I know,unfair to friends who have to
live there--or else in slums--but sometimes its cultivated innocence feels like
an assault.I don't want to join the country club because there are no parks.I
don't want to leave my car in an underground garage,rise to the office, sink at
the end of day,drive home unable to stop or roll down the windowstill I see the
familiar guard in his gatepost waiting at the start of our street.
This
sealed-off life--even the ease of it disturbs me.Secure, imperturbable, it
floats in a daydream of possibilities--a trip to the water park, things to buy
at the hardware depot,quality time, preparation for success, Have you
outstript the rest? Are you the President? --a huge ball of dust drifting
and whirlingas the light from burnt-out stars races over it.
